None of them was prepared for what it set off. He looked up with grotesque anguish and said, “Forgive—” and then, abruptly, began to cry. Callie’s eyebrows lifted, and she stood balanced a minute, then came around the corner of the table to his side and stretched out her hand as if to touch him, but on second thought drew it back. “Here now,” she said, almost gently.
Jimmy said, “Man is crying.”
“Hush,” Henry said.
“My wife,” Simon Bale sobbed, “God grant—”
She put her hand on his back and said, “Shh, shh!” as she would to a child, but her touch opened all the rivers of Simon’s heart, and he began to whoop. Quite suddenly Jimmy began to cry too, as if his heart would break; and as if hardly knowing he was doing it, Simon reached over blindly and patted at the high chair tray, mumbling “Bless … no importance …,” getting his fingertips in egg yolk, and at that Henry too began to cry.
“It’s all right,” Callie said as if indignantly, tears running down her cheeks, the look of surprise still there on her face, “we’ll take care of you, Simon, it’s all right; now stop.”
The room was full of sunlight and the smell of coffee like heaven’s love, and Simon blew his nose. Henry pulled off his glasses and thought of asking for the handkerchief but changed his mind and got up for a Kleenex and used it and offered the unused part to Callie, who reached out, then hesitated, and decided to get one of her own.
“Simon,” Callie said, “you must see Henry’s garden!”
“Me too!” Jimmy said. He prepared his face for outrage in case they shouldn’t let him.
They laughed, even Simon (but horribly, Callie thought — forgiving him, though with some reservations, even as she thought it), and Henry got up and said, “Jimmy, you show Simon our rabbit tracks.”
Henry got Jimmy down out of his chair, and Callie helped Simon up and led him, as though he were an old, old man, toward the door. “Thank you,” Simon said. “Forgive—” He blew his nose, then straightened a little, flashing his idiotic smile, and looked out at the green morning. He nodded. “Praise,” he said. The cracks in the back of his neck were grimy, and his hair needed cutting.
“You want to take Simon’s hand, Jimmy?” Callie said.
Jimmy thought about it, looking at the man, and Simon leered at the little boy and held out his hand, a limp, raised claw, and waited as if in terror. Abruptly, Jimmy reached up for the hand. Henry laughed, and Callie, after a moment’s hesitation, laughed too.
4
Callie’s mother came down that afternoon to help out at the diner. She was a heavyish, determined little woman with iron-gray hair, a pretty face, dimpled elbows; “artistic,” she liked to say: She played the piano and organ at the church. She enjoyed working at the diner, which she tended to think of as Callie’s, not Henry’s. Certainly the place was greatly changed since Henry Soames had married Callie: new paint, clean linoleum, bright artificial flowers on the tables. Callie too had an artistic streak; no doubt she was a throwback to Uncle Al — Callie’s mother’s Uncle Al who’d done oil paintings of imaginary country scenes … among others, the picture in Callie’s dining room, called “Summer Evening.” Eleanor Wells had never thought highly of waitresses, but it was different now, in her own daughter’s place, her own grandchild running about, solemn-faced, his right arm sawing across the front of him as he ran. It was a family diner, as she liked to say, a place people brought their whole families to, and one of these days, who knew? they might expand it and make it a truly first-class restaurant, like the Chicken Pot, down in Slater. She’d gone so far as to mention it once or twice to Callie, and though Callie hadn’t said one word back, she’d listened, and she would think about it, you could see. After that Ellie Wells had taken to wearing her black hostess’s dress when she came to help out at the Stop-Off, with a little white apron she’d bought especially, and all she did she did with elegance. Her Frank would say (with a half-dozen curse-words she wouldn’t repeat), “No wonder men hate their mother-in-laws,” but he didn’t know a thing about it. Frank couldn’t understand Henry Soames like she could. Henry appreciated her help, and he respected her, he truly did. He would listen to anything she had to say with all the patience in the world (he was a good man, he truly was), and almost always, when he’d thought about it, he would come around to her way of thinking (something her Frank never did). That, as a matter of fact, was why she’d come here today.
She said nothing, however. She could tell from the minute she came in that there was something in the air, the way they pussyfooted, her daughter and Henry, but for the life of her she couldn’t make out if they were mad at each other or what. Jimmy was out in the garden with that man, and it was all Ellie Wells could do to shut her teeth and ignore it. She peeked out at them from time to time, when Henry and Callie were out of the room, and as far as she could see it was still all right. Just the same, it made her heart beat fast that he was there. Callie was just too innocent. “Just like a baby,” she thought. (It was just like that time at church camp, when she’d let that town man, a perfect stranger, comb out her hair, down by the lake. Or like the time she’d left her purse with that lady at the bus depot.) But Ellie polished the napkin holders and pursed her lips and waited.
The man just sat on the bench like a tramp. He had stubble on his chin and filthy-dirty clothes and a queer way of sitting with his knees and toes together and his heels thrown out to the sides. He had his hands on his knees and his calf-eyes riveted to the ground. Jimmy would talk to him sometimes, and the man would tip his head and smile and maybe pat him on the back and say a few words (she’d have given a half-dollar to hear what they were saying), and then he’d fall back into his staring fit, and, to Ellie Wells’ enormous relief, Jimmy would wander away.
Toward mid-afternoon, when she and Callie were alone in the diner, she said, “Where does Henry know him from, Callie?” As if it had just now happened to come into her mind.
“Know who, Mother?” Callie said. (Callie had always been like that, never letting on when things were bothering her. It had always made it hard, even when Callie was a little girl. It put you in the wrong when all you intended was truly her own good.)
“Why, your company,” she said, not quite as lightly as she’d intended.
(“Now damn you, Ellie, you leave them alone,” her Frank would say. “You keep away from there and mind your own business,” and he would bang his fist on his leg like a little boy having a tantrum. And, oh yes, that was fine to say, “mind your own business.” He’d minded his own business for fifty years, even when Callie was in trouble and no place to turn but Henry Soames. “They’re like children,” she’d said — that was this morning, before she’d come down. “They don’t know about people like that.” “Like what?” he’d said. Well she didn’t know, she would admit it, and maybe she was being a worry-wart, she’d admit that too, but what was she supposed to do, Henry Soames being the kind of man he was, and Callie even worse? It was so hard, trying to do the right thing. Why was that? Why couldn’t they be grateful?)